scholarly journals Gender and Educational Inequalities during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Preliminary Insights from Poland

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12403
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Krywult-Albańska ◽  
Łukasz Albański

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has had a profound impact on many spheres of social life across the world. One of them has been the deepening of social inequalities and the aggravating of discrimination based on gender. Emerging studies in the field of education and occupation systems point to the fact that women seem to have been particularly affected, along with layoffs in those sectors of the economy where female staffs prevail. Additionally, in many countries, the burden of combining professional careers and supporting the education of young children falls disproportionately on mothers. These transformations pose a challenge to meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, wherein gender equality is an important factor. This article uses official statistical data to examine gender and educational structures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland, set against the backdrop of other European nations and analyzed in the context of sustainability. Have educational and gender inequalities been exacerbated as data from other countries suggest? In order to answer this question, the article traces changes in the education system in Poland and their implications for gender structures. The latter have also been affected by transformations on the labor market in various sectors of the economy, therefore, the second part of the analysis focuses on the labor market changes during the pandemic. The final section offers conclusions on the implications of the pandemic for the studied issues. Throughout the article, we apply the principles of unobtrusive research. Following the theoretical framework outlined in the first part of the paper, we carry out a descriptive analysis of existing statistical data collected by the Eurostat. These official statistics are supplemented by an overview of public opinion polls to allow for perspectives on structural changes, as they are perceived by those affected by them.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 158-167
Author(s):  
Hooshmand Alizadeh ◽  
Josef Kohlbacher ◽  
Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin ◽  
Tabin Latif Raouf

Feminist street art aims to transform patriarchal spaces into places of gendered resistance by asserting a feminist presence in the city. Considering this, as well as women’s social life, their struggle against lingering forces of patriarchy, and relating features of inequality (domestic violence), there was a feminist installation artwork by the young Kurdish artist Tara Abdulla that shook the city of Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan on 26 October 2020. She had prepared a 4,800‐meter‐long washing line covered with the clothes of 99,678 Kurdish women who were survivors of sexual and gender‐based violence. They installed it along the busiest street of the city (Salim Street). She used this piece of feminine to express her reaction to the Kurdish society regarding, the abuse that goes on silently, behind closed doors. She also aimed towards normalizing women’s bodies. After the installation, she received many controversial reactions. As her artwork was a pioneering project in line with feminist issues in Kurdistan which preoccupied the city for quite a while, the aim of this article is to investigate the diverse effects of her work on the current dialogue regarding gender inequality in the Kurdish society. To do this, we used the research method of content analysis on big data (Facebook comments) to investigate the public reactions of a larger number of locals. The Feminine effectively exposed some of the deep‐rooted cultural, religious, and social barriers in addressing gender inequalities and silent sexual violence issues in the modern Kurdish patriarchal society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Sara El Ouedrhiri ◽  
Hafsa El Mesbahi

In a time of great uncertainties, the world witnesses, for the very first instance in its modern history a global lockdown spanning over all the vital spheres of economic and social life. At this point, when neither leaving home nor staying is an option, the surge to exponentially study the manner in which human life has evolved and been shaped under such circumstances gained valuable interest, especially within the circles of feminist and human rights-based academia. Respectively, researchers argue that the weight of the lockdown and movement restriction policies fall discriminately on men and women as they are interestingly leading such novel experiences in different ways. Men, by having no concern mounting to the priority of protecting themselves from being inflicted by this global pandemic and maintaining their economic roles as the traditional family providers, and women on the margin side of the picture, having to deal with the burden of surviving the dangers that the outside and the inside worlds akin dispose. Henceforth, this article is an attempt to probe the dynamics of the private sphere considering the intersections between oppression, seclusion and violence and the development of new dynamics of resistance by transposing from the early 20th century’s feminine experience of confinement and the 21st century’s global lockdown in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research considers the stories presented by the renowned Moroccan sociologist and author “Fatima Mernissi”, who herself lived a different kind of seclusion behind the colossal and skillfully ostentatious walls of the harem of the city of Fez in the forties of the previous century and this shall be done mainly by reviewing the stories of resistance presented in her memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood; and by considering the stories of five respondents who have shared with us their accounts through various social media outlets upon the surge of the pandemic in Morocco. The purpose here is to unravel the convergences between women’s experiences of gender-based violence (GBV) in both confinements and to foreground the value, significance and challenges these feminine insights being in them simple acts of everyday life constitute in establishing a discourse of resistance and feminine empowerment vis-à-vis patriarchy, seclusion and gender-based violence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110640
Author(s):  
Christopher M. McLeod ◽  
Hanhan Xue ◽  
Joshua I. Newman

Esports is often described as a growing industry ripe with financial opportunities for young professional, competitive gamers. However, these claims rarely consider how income is distributed amongst players. This study uses prize earnings data from 2005 to 2019 to examine labor market inequality and related social inequalities and social stratifications. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients show that inequality has increased in the labor market overall and the labor markets for the five top games based on total prizes awarded ( Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, League of Legends, StarCraft II). Competitors can expect to earn more today than in 2005, but median incomes have shown sporadic and inconsistent growth compared with top incomes. Moreover, most competitors earn less than the US poverty threshold. Comparing the earnings of the top female players to the whole labor market shows that gender inequalities exist in median incomes and the likelihood of earning more than the poverty threshold. The esports labor market is an engine of inequality that provides opportunities for a few (primarily male) competitors while building a growing class of lowly paid players who support the interests of game designers and event organizers.


Author(s):  
Jason Beckfield ◽  
Nancy Krieger

Health, illness, and death are distributed unequally around the world. Babies born in Japan can expect to live to age 80 or over, while babies born in Malawi can expect to die before the age of 50. As important, birth into one race, class, and gender within one society vs. another also matters enormously for one’s health. To answer such questions about social inequalities in health, Political Sociology and the People’s Health responds to two research trends that are motivating scholarship at the leading edge of inquiry into population health. First, social epidemiology is turning toward policy and politics to explain the unequal global distribution of population health. Second, social stratification research is turning toward new conceptualizations and theorizations of how institutions—the “rules of the game” that organize power in social life—distribute social goods, including health. Political Sociology and the People’s Health advances these two turns by developing new hypotheses that integrate insights from political sociology and social epidemiology. Political sociology offers a rich array of concepts, measures, and data that help social epidemiologists develop new hypotheses about how macroscopic factors like social policy, labor markets, and the racialized and gendered state shape the distribution of population health. Social epidemiology offers innovative approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of population, etiologic period, and distribution that can advance research on the relationships between institutions and inequalities. Developing the conversation between these fields, Political Sociology and the People’s Health describes how human institutional arrangements distribute life and death.


Author(s):  
Robert Stefko ◽  
Beata Gavurova ◽  
Viera Ivankova ◽  
Martin Rigelsky

The objective is to evaluate the relations between gender health inequalities and economic prosperity in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The groups included health indicators in the specification of men, women and gender inequalities: life expectancy, causes of mortality and avoidable mortality. The variable determining the economic prosperity was represented by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The analytical processing included descriptive analysis, analysis of differences and analysis of relationships. The regression analysis was presented as the main output of the research. Most of the significant gender differences in health showed a more positive outcome for women. It is possible to identify a certain relation between gender health inequalities and economic prosperity. If there is some reduction in gender inequalities in health, the economic prosperity will increase. The reduction seems to be more effective on the part of men than women. The output of the cluster analysis showed the relations of indicators evaluating the inequalities and the prosperity. The countries such as Luxembourg, Norway or Switzerland showed very positive outputs, on the other hand, the countries with a potential for the improvement are Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia. Overall, the policies should focus on reducing the inequalities in avoidable mortality as well as reducing the frequent diseases in younger people.


Author(s):  
Yercin Mamani Ortiz ◽  
Per E. Gustafsson ◽  
Miguel San Sebastián Chasco ◽  
Ada Ximena Armaza Céspedes ◽  
Jenny Marcela Luizaga López ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Social inequalities in obesity have been observed not only by gender but also between ethnic groups. Evidence on combined dimensions of inequality in health, and specifically including indigenous populations, is however scarce, and presents a particularly daunting challenge for successful prevention and control of obesity in Bolivia, as well as worldwide. Objective The aims of this study were i) to examine intersectional inequalities in obesity and ii) to identify the factors underlying the observed intersectional inequalities. Methods An intersectional approach study was employed, using the information collected in a cross-sectional community-based survey. The sample consisted of youth and adults with permanent residence in Cochabamba department (N = 5758), selected through a multistage sampling technique. An adapted version of the WHO-STEPS survey was used to collect information about Abdominal obesity and risk factors associated. Four intersectional positions were constructed from gender (woman vs. men) and ethnic group (indigenous vs. mestizo). Joint and excess intersectional disparities in obesity were estimated as absolute prevalence differences between binary groups, using binomial regression models. The Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was applied to estimate the contributions of explanatory factors underlying the observed intersectional disparities, using Oaxaca command in Stata software v15.1. Results The prevalence of abdominal obesity had a higher prevalence in mestizos (men 35.01% and women 30.71%) as compared to indigenous (men 25.38% and women 27.75%). The joint disparity was estimated at 7.26 percentage points higher prevalence in the doubly advantaged mestizo men than in the doubly disadvantaged indigenous women. The gender referent disparity showed that mestizo-women had a higher prevalence than indigenous-women. The ethnic referent disparity showed that mestizo-men had a higher prevalence than indigenous men. The behavioural risk factors were the most important to explain the observed inequalities, while differences in socioeconomic and demographic factors played a less important role. Conclusion Our study illustrates that abdominal obesity is not distributed according to expected patterns of structural disadvantage in the intersectional space of ethnicity and gender in Bolivia. In the Cochabamba case, a high social advantage was related to higher rates of abdominal obesity, as well as the behavioural risk factors associated with them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Piasna ◽  
Jan Drahokoupil

Digitalisation, automation and technological change have brought about shifts in the occupational structure, the place and the timing of work, and career patterns, putting a further strain on the standard employment relationship. In the recent research on digitalisation, scant attention has however been paid to the gender impact of these changes. This article addresses this gap by developing a gender perspective on digitalisation, considering how these developments interact with existing social inequalities and gender segregation patterns in the labour market. We identify two broad areas in which digitalisation has thus far had a pronounced effect on employment: the structure of employment (including occupational change and the task content of jobs) and forms of work (including employment relationships and work organisation). We find that, despite the profound changes in the labour market, traditional gender inequalities continue to reassert themselves on many dimensions. With standard employment declining in significance, the policy challenge is to include new forms of work in effective labour protection frameworks that promote equal access of women and men to quality jobs and their equal treatment at work.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 580
Author(s):  
Mame Cheikh Anta Sall ◽  
Adriana Burlea-Schiopoiu

The paper aims to analyze the impact of public investments generated by implementing the Emerging Senegal Plan (ESP) on economic growth and gender inequalities observed in the labor market in Senegal. A dynamic computable general equilibrium modeling was carried out for this purpose using a social accounting matrix (SAM) based on an extensive segmentation of the labor market according to gender and socio-professional category. The results prove that the investments made in priority market sectors led, overall, to a good trajectory of economic growth. Moreover, job creation followed the expansion of sectors of the economy, which increased their demand for labor because of the capital increase. In conclusion, there is a strong demand for qualified women (senior executives and middle executives). We recommend considering positive discrimination in favor of women by implementing public employment programs and the importance of recovery sectors affected by the pandemic.


2018 ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Maria Petmesidou ◽  
María González Menéndez

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, rising levels of youth unemployment led to an array of policy responses involving learning, transfer, and experimentation to address the complex needs of youth at risk. Reviewing these recent experiences, this chapter examines nine European countries (including Turkey) representing a range of different school-to-work transition regimes and with varying levels of youth unemployment and gender inequalities. It analyzes the institutional and process “enablers” of and “barriers” to policy learning and innovation, and it traces the pathways and major foci of learning and transfer within and between countries, as well as through supranational channels. This examination highlights where changes in policy governance have occurred. It is concluded that innovative initiatives for sustained labor market integration of youth require a policy environment that is conducive to coordinated sharing and diffusion of knowledge between different levels of administration and joint stakeholders’ bodies.


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